Books Like The Midnight Library

What to expect from The Train Between Worlds

Where it lines up with The Midnight Library, and where it deliberately does not:

Same as The Midnight Library

A place outside ordinary life. One clean rule governing everything. A guide figure who knows more than she says. A protagonist forced to audit who they are.

Different

The rule takes something real every time you use it, and you never learn which memory you paid. No narrator tells you it is going to be all right. There is no old life waiting; the question is who to become, not whether to go back.

Tone

Surreal and dreamlike rather than consoling. The unsettling half of Haig, without the reassuring half.

If you want the feeling instead

Read The Memory Fare, Book Two: Cora Marsh boards the train to find her daughter, and every door she opens costs one true memory of her. The book readers compare to Before the Coffee Gets Cold, and the one that makes them cry.

Content notes

Memory loss, dissociation, psychological disorientation. No on-page violence.

Reading order

Book One, but fully standalone; the three novels share a train and a rule, not a plot.

Formats

Kindle. Free to borrow with Kindle Unlimited.

Start here: which half of The Midnight Library are you missing?

Haig’s novel is 288 pages and does two things that have very little to do with each other. Be honest about which one you came for.

1. I loved the library: the room between life and death, the Book of Regrets, the shelves of other lives, the one rule.

   You want the machinery, and the machinery has a history the lists never mention. Replay (1987) is the novel that invented the modern version: a man dies at forty-three and wakes at eighteen, again and again. Life After Life is the same idea done as literature, with the Blitz in it. Dark Matter is the multiverse of your own choices as a thriller, and it is the closest thing in print to Nora’s question asked with a gun in the room. Before the Coffee Gets Cold is the warm one: a single chair and a rule you cannot bend.

   Life After Life · Replay · Dark Matter · Before the Coffee Gets Cold

2. I loved the feeling: I was somewhere dark, and this book told me plainly that it wasn’t too late.

   This is the bigger group, and the one the read-alike lists serve worst, because they keep handing you time-loop romances when what you wanted was to be consoled. None of these has a rule or a library. A Man Called Ove is a widower whose suicide attempts keep being interrupted by neighbours. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the same rescue from the inside. The Humans is Haig making the case for being alive through an alien who has to learn it. Reasons to Stay Alive is Haig making it in his own voice, about himself. Oona Out of Order has a gimmick, but the gimmick is only there to make her take stock.

   A Man Called Ove · Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine · The Humans · Reasons to Stay Alive · Oona Out of Order

3. I liked it, but it was too neat. Same idea, less reassurance.

   You agree with the reviews. NPR’s was headlined “It’s not quite dark enough”; Kirkus called it “sweet yet somewhat forgettable”. The corrective is Life After Life, which never tells you which life counted, and Dark Matter, which lets the other versions of you want your life back. The novel on this site takes the rule and makes it cost something, and the fit note at the bottom is candid about how that feels.

   Life After Life · Dark Matter

4. I just want more Matt Haig.

   Three of his are on this page. The Humans (2013) is the closest in argument. Reasons to Stay Alive (2015) is where the argument came from. How to Stop Time (2017) is the one everyone recommends, and it is a romance about a man who ages slowly, not a book about regret. The Life Impossible (2024), his follow-up, is covered in the questions at the end.

   The Humans · Reasons to Stay Alive · How to Stop Time

What The Midnight Library actually is, and why the lists get it wrong

Search this question and you get the same twenty-odd titles rearranged: Oona Out of Order, The Measure, Addie LaRue, How to Stop Time, Life After Life, a run of time-loop romances, and, on one well-ranked page, The Library at Mount Char, which is a book about a god who tortures children and is on the list because it has the word “library” in the title. The lists are keyed to the device (alternate lives, second chances, time loops) and to a mood word (“uplifting”). What none of them says is what the book is about. Nora Seed takes an overdose on page twenty-something. The library is where she goes while it is decided whether she lives. Every other life she tries is a way of asking whether the one she has is worth going back to.

Haig has been direct about where that came from. Asked about the idea in October 2020 he said: “For me, depression was often flavored with the desire to inhabit parallel lives, lives where I had done something differently.” He gave up piano at twelve and says the rock-star life is his own wish fulfilment. So take the book apart and you get two things that do not require each other. The premise: a room outside life, a librarian who knows more than she says, one rule (open a book, live the life, come back the moment you are disappointed). The feeling: a person who wanted to die being told, in plain sentences, that the smallness of a life is not evidence against it. Books that nail the first are usually much colder than Haig. Books that nail the second usually have no premise at all. Below, every pick is tagged with which half it supplies, and the counterweight section names the ones that supply neither.

Closest: the premise, done four ways

A place outside your life, one rule, and the other versions of you. Ordered from the most literary to the warmest.

1. 01

   Life After Life Kate Atkinson

   2013 · 544 pages · Ursula Todd, close third, born 11 February 1910, repeatedly

   Closest match The premise

   Ursula is born in a snowstorm in Buckinghamshire and dies with the cord round her neck. Then she is born again and the doctor gets there in time. She drowns at the seaside; then she is pulled out. She dies of Spanish flu in 1918 on three attempts and survives on the fourth by pushing the maid down the stairs before she can bring it home. The book keeps returning to the same moments, and each time Ursula carries something forward that she cannot name: a dread, a sense of the stairs. By the middle she is in the Blitz, and Atkinson gives it to you from three different lives; by the end she is in a café in Munich in 1930 with a pistol in her handbag.

   This is Nora’s library without the librarian and without the reassurance. Nobody tells Ursula the rule; she has to feel her way to it, and the novel never confirms whether the lives “happened”. It won the Costa and a spot in the New York Times’s hundred best books of the century, and Janet Maslin was right that its games are “purposeful rather than emptily playful”. It is also twice Haig’s length and a great deal harder on its heroine. If what you wanted was the shelves of other lives, this is the most serious book ever written about them.

   How it ends

   It ends on a version of the opening scene, and a birth that finally goes right, and refuses to say whether that was the last try.

   Contains

   A rape, told plainly, and the abusive marriage that follows it in one life; The Blitz in detail, including a child’s death; Suicide of a secondary character

   Skip if

   Skip it if you want to be told which life was the right one; Atkinson never does.

   Checked against: Wikipedia: structure, awards, the NYT list, Kirkus review

2. 02

   Replay Ken Grimwood

   1987 · 311 pages · Jeff Winston, 43, close third

   Closest match The premise

   The novel that every book in this tier descends from, and the one no ranking list has. Jeff Winston, a radio journalist in a stale marriage, dies of a heart attack at his desk in October 1988 and wakes in his dorm room at Emory in 1963, eighteen years old, with everything he knows intact. He bets on the Kentucky Derby, gets rich, lives to 1988, and dies again at the same minute. Then he wakes in 1963 again, a little later than before. Grimwood, as Jo Walton put it, explores the idea “in a proper science fictional way, ringing a lot of variations on it”: the money life, the family life, the life spent trying to stop Dallas, the life spent looking for anyone else this is happening to. There is someone, and she made a film in 1974 that could not have existed.

   What it shares with Haig is the exact shape of the question: given every version of your life, which one is worth keeping? What it lacks is Haig’s tenderness; Jeff’s regrets are a man’s regrets from 1987 and read that way. It won the World Fantasy Award and was the acknowledged precursor of Groundhog Day. Short, tense, and the ending is the most honest of any book here.

   How it ends

   The replays run out, and he is handed the one life he cannot redo; an epilogue starts somebody else’s.

   Contains

   1980s sexual politics throughout; A daughter who exists in one life and not the next

   Skip if

   Skip it if you need the premise to come with warmth; this is the idea stripped to the frame.

   Checked against: Wikipedia: plot, World Fantasy Award, Groundhog Day, Reactor: Jo Walton on Replay (2012)

3. 03

   Dark Matter Blake Crouch

   2016 · 342 pages · Jason Dessen, first person, present tense

   Closest match The premise

   Jason Dessen teaches physics at a small Chicago college, is married to Daniela, has a son, and gave up the research career that would have made him famous. One night a masked man abducts him, asks “Are you happy with your life?”, and injects him. He wakes in a world where he made the other choice: no wife, no son, a prize, and a box that opens onto every world at once. The man who took him is himself, the version who chose the work and came back for the family. The rest of the book is Jason walking through Chicago after Chicago trying to find the one with his own kitchen in it.

   USA Today called it “a nightmarish quantum-mechanics version of It’s a Wonderful Life”, and since It’s a Wonderful Life is the film behind Haig’s book, that is the recommendation. It is Nora’s library run as a chase, with the other selves given knives. The paragraphs are one line long, which NPR found “annoying at first, then infuriating, then simply numbing”, and Daniela is barely a person. But it makes Haig’s point, that the unlived life is not empty but occupied, harder than Haig ever does.

   “Are you happy with your life?” the abductor’s first question, ch. 1

   How it ends

   It ends with a door chosen together and no guarantee about what is on the other side.

   Contains

   Violence, including a killing by the narrator; Dozens of versions of the same man competing for one woman, who gets little say

   Skip if

   Skip it if Haig’s gentleness was the point; Crouch has none and does not miss it.

   Checked against: Wikipedia: plot, reception, the USA Today line, Apple TV+ series, Kirkus review

4. 04

   Before the Coffee Gets Cold Toshikazu Kawaguchi

   2015 · 213 pages · tr. Geoffrey Trousselot · four visitors to one Tokyo café, close third

   Closest match The premise

   A basement café in Tokyo with one chair that sends you back in time, on conditions: you can only meet someone who has been in the café; you cannot leave the seat; nothing you do will change the present; and you must drink the coffee before it goes cold. Four people sit in it. A woman whose boyfriend left for America. A nurse whose husband has Alzheimer’s and wrote her a letter he no longer remembers writing. A bar owner and the sister she kept turning away. The café’s co-owner, who goes forward instead of back.

   Haig’s library and Kawaguchi’s chair are the same device, a place outside life with one rule, and the difference is what the rule permits. Nora is allowed to change everything; the café lets you change nothing, and people go anyway. The writing is plain to the point of flatness (the Christian Science Monitor was polite: “occasionally uneven and tends to meander”), and it was a stage play first, which shows. It is here because it is the second-most-searched read-alike and because the constraint is the point. This site has a whole page on it, linked at the end.

   How it ends

   It ends with the co-owner’s trip forward to meet a daughter she may not live to raise, and the café stays open for the sequels.

   Contains

   Dementia in a spouse; A sibling’s death; A pregnancy with a known risk to the mother

   Skip if

   Skip it if you want prose; the sentences are furniture and the rules are the book.

   Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, the rules, the four stories, Christian Science Monitor review (via Smithsonian BookDragon)

Strong: the feeling, without the library

No rule, no room between worlds. Five books that do what the second half of Haig’s novel does, which is tell someone in a bad place that the ordinary life they have is the one worth keeping.

5. 05

   A Man Called Ove Fredrik Backman

   2012 · 368 pages · tr. Henning Koch · Ove, 59, close third, with flashbacks

   Strong match The feeling

   Ove has been made redundant, his wife Sonja has died of cancer, and he has decided to hang himself in the hall. He has checked the hook. Then a pregnant Iranian woman called Parvaneh reverses a trailer into his letterbox, and the attempt is postponed. Every subsequent attempt is interrupted by someone who needs something: a cat, a teenager thrown out by his father, the friend he has not spoken to in years, a journalist. The flashbacks explain the man: a father dead at sixteen, a honeymoon bus crash that put Sonja in a wheelchair, and a life built entirely around her.

   Nobody in the read-alike lists says the obvious thing, which is that The Midnight Library is a book about a suicide attempt and so is this one. Backman’s method is the opposite of Haig’s: no library, no other lives, just the neighbours refusing to leave a man alone until the house is full. Kirkus found it occasionally “preachy or overly pat”, which is fair and is also the charge against Haig. If you cried at the end of Nora’s story, you will cry here, and the book earns it more slowly.

   How it ends

   Years later he dies of the heart condition he was hiding, and the whole street comes; it is the ending the book has been arguing for.

   Contains

   Repeated suicide attempts on the page, some played for comedy; A spouse’s cancer; A miscarriage in the backstory

   Skip if

   Skip it if you cannot stand a grump being redeemed by a cat; it is exactly that book, and it knows.

   Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, translation, plot, Kirkus review

6. 06

   Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine Gail Honeyman

   2017 · 383 pages · Eleanor, 29, first person

   Strong match The feeling

   Eleanor works in accounts in Glasgow, has done for nine years, eats the same lunch, drinks two bottles of vodka every weekend, and takes a phone call from her mother on Wednesdays. She has a scar on her face she does not explain. She is, she says, completely fine. The plot is small: she and Raymond from IT help an old man who collapses in the street, and the old man’s family and Raymond’s mother start, without asking, to include her. Halfway through, after a concert, the fineness stops, and the second half is what happens when someone finds you in time.

   Jenny Colgan called it “a narrative full of quiet warmth and deep and unspoken sadness”, which is also a description of Haig at his best. What it has that Haig does not is the voice: Eleanor is very funny about things that are not, and the comedy is what makes the collapse land. The twist about the phone calls is guessable, and does not matter. It won the Costa for a first novel and the British Book of the Year, and it is the book on this page most often bought by people who finished The Midnight Library and wanted the feeling again without a library.

   How it ends

   The phone calls stop, for good, and a life starts at thirty; it is quiet and it is a happy ending.

   Contains

   A suicide attempt; Alcohol dependence; Child abuse and a house fire in the backstory

   Skip if

   Skip it if you need the premise; there is not a speculative sentence in it.

   Checked against: Wikipedia: plot, awards, Book Marks: the Guardian, Kirkus and PW verdicts

1. 07

   The Humans Matt Haig

   2013 · 256 pages · an alien in the body of Professor Andrew Martin, first person

   Strong match The feeling

   A Cambridge mathematician proves the Riemann hypothesis, and an alien civilisation that considers the proof dangerous sends one of its own to take over his body, destroy the work and kill everyone he told. The alien arrives naked on the M11, learns about clothes, peanut butter and Emily Dickinson, and then meets the mathematician’s wife, his suicidal teenage son and the dog. It is the mission going wrong, told as comedy, and it ends with a list of ninety-seven pieces of “Advice for a human” that is the most quoted thing Haig wrote before Nora.

   Of everything he has published, this is the nearest to The Midnight Library in argument, and the lists reach past it for How to Stop Time because that one sold more. Both books are a stranger to ordinary life being talked into it. Kirkus called this one “A saccharine novel”, in full, and it can be; Jeanette Winterson called it “a laugh-and-cry book”, and it is that too. The son’s storyline is the one to watch. It is where Haig first wrote down what he later gave Mrs Elm to say.

   How it ends

   It ends with a choice to stay, and the list; both are what you expect and both work.

   Contains

   A teenager’s suicide attempt; Killings by the narrator early on, told offhandedly

   Skip if

   Skip it if Haig’s directness already grated; this is him with the dial turned up.

   Checked against: Kirkus review, Matt Haig’s site: the press quotes in full

2. 08

   Reasons to Stay Alive Matt Haig

   2015 · 264 pages · Haig, first person; memoir

   Strong match The feeling

   Not a novel. At twenty-four, in Ibiza, Haig walked to a cliff edge intending to go over it, and did not. This is the account of the three years after, written in fragments: what a panic attack is from inside, what it is like to be unable to go to the shop, lists of things that helped and things that did not, and a running argument with his younger self. Five sections, titled Falling, Landing, Rising, Living, Being. A Sunday Times number one; Kirkus called it “A vibrant, encouraging depiction of a sinister disorder”.

   Why it is on a fiction page: the feeling half of The Midnight Library is this book with a plot attached. Nora’s Book of Regrets, the sentence about the big importance of small things, the insistence that the view from inside depression is not information about the world: all of it is here first, unfictionalised. Readers who found Haig’s novel too neat sometimes find this one truer, because there is no library to blame. Readers who were helped by the novel usually want this next and do not know it exists.

   How it ends

   It ends with two lists, things that make him feel better and things that make him feel worse, and no cure.

   Contains

   Suicidal ideation described from the inside; Panic attacks and derealisation, in detail

   Skip if

   Skip it if you wanted a story; it is a companion, not a narrative.

   Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, structure, reception, Kirkus review

3. 09

   Oona Out of Order Margarita Montimore

   2020 · 352 pages · Oona Lockhart, close third

   Strong match The feeling

   New Year’s Eve 1982, Brooklyn. Oona is about to turn nineteen and has to choose between a music scholarship in London and a year touring with her boyfriend’s band. At midnight she faints and wakes up fifty-one, in 2015, in a house she owns, with a note from herself. From then on every January first she jumps to a different year of her own adult life, in random order: thirty-three, then forty-something, then twenty-seven. Her mother and an assistant called Kenzie help her keep track. She writes letters to the next Oona and does not always take her own advice.

   It is on every list, and it is here because, of the many gimmick books recommended, it is the one whose gimmick is doing what Haig’s does: making a woman audit a life by standing outside its order. Kirkus was exact: it “celebrates its implausibility with a unique joie de vivre”. It is lighter than The Midnight Library, funnier, and does not argue a thesis, which for some readers is the relief.

   How it ends

   It ends back on the birthday it began with, knowing most of what is coming and going anyway.

   Contains

   A parent’s illness and death, arriving out of order; A bad marriage in one of the years

   Skip if

   Skip it if you want the mechanics to make sense; they do not, and the book says so.

   Checked against: Kirkus review, Open Letters Review (Olive Fellows)

At a glance: each book against The Midnight Library

Three questions that decide whether a book will work for you after Haig. “Consoling” means the book wants you to feel better by the end; several of the best ones do not.

Page counts are for the first UK or US editions given in the research file; paperbacks vary.

Loose: worth your time, for a different reason than the lists give

10. 10

    The Measure Nikki Erlick

    2022 · 353 pages · eight characters, alternating close third

    Looser match The premise

    One morning every adult on earth finds a wooden box on the doorstep with a string inside. The length of the string is the length of the life left. Erlick follows eight people, a woman and her fiancé with different strings, a schoolteacher, a soldier, a presidential candidate who builds a campaign on string status, and works the premise outward: insurance, dating profiles, the army, who is allowed to run for office. The reviewers agreed it “really shines when she tackles the bigger picture”, and it was a Read with Jenna pick that sold half a million copies.

    The lists file it next to Haig because both are one-rule thought experiments, and that is right as far as it goes. The difference is scale. Nora’s library is private; the strings are a public event, and the book is about policy as much as people. It is consoling in Haig’s way, warmly and on purpose, and its ending is the one readers argue about. Read it if what you liked was the cleanness of the idea rather than the loneliness of the room.

    How it ends

    The strings stay, the characters choose anyway, and a coda years later says whether they were right.

    Contains

    A death foreseen for the whole book, and then arriving

    Skip if

    Skip it if you wanted one person in one room; this is a society in a newsroom.

    Checked against: Goodreads: edition, page count, the eight characters, Columbia Magazine review (Rebecca Shapiro)

11. 11

    How to Stop Time Matt Haig

    2017 · 352 pages · Tom Hazard, first person, across four centuries

    Looser match More Haig

    Tom Hazard was born in 1581 and ages a year for every fifteen that pass. He has worked for Shakespeare, sailed with Cook, drunk with Fitzgerald, and is now a history teacher in a London comprehensive, which is the best joke in the book. A society of people like him, run by a man called Hendrich, keeps them hidden and has one rule: never fall in love. Tom has done it once, in the 1600s, and has been looking for the daughter it produced ever since.

    This is the book every list recommends first, because it is Haig’s other bestseller, and it is the least like The Midnight Library of the three of his here. The Guardian called it “a high-concept romance” and that is the accurate shelf; the regret in it is a man’s for a wife, not a woman’s for a life. What it shares is the voice, unembarrassed and kind, and the conviction that a long view makes small things bigger. If it was the voice you loved, this will do. If it was Nora’s question, it will not ask it.

    How it ends

    Hendrich is dealt with, the rule is broken, and it ends as a romance ends.

    Contains

    A witch trial and a hanging in the 1590s strand; A daughter missing for centuries

    Skip if

    Skip it if you wanted the premise; there is no room outside life here, only a long one inside it.

    Checked against: Wikipedia: publication, plot, reception, adaptation, Matt Haig’s site: press quotes

Counterweight: the one you will be told to read

12. 12

    The Invisible Life of Addie LaRue V. E. Schwab

    2020 · 448 pages · Addie, close third, 1714 to 2014; later chapters from Henry

    The counterweight Neither half

    In 1714, in a village on the Sarthe, Adeline LaRue prays to the old gods after dark to escape a marriage, and one answers: a figure she calls Luc, who gives her freedom and forever on the condition that nobody will remember her once they look away. Three hundred years of that. Then, in a New York bookshop in 2014, a man called Henry says the words “I remember you”, and the novel becomes a love story with a deadline, because Henry has made a deal of his own. Thirty-seven weeks on the New York Times list; Kirkus called it “the kind of book you stay up all night reading”.

    It is on this page because it is the number one next read among Haig’s readers and because it shows by contrast what The Midnight Library is. Both are about a bargain and a woman deciding what a life is for. But Addie never doubts that hers is worth having; the whole book is her insisting on it. Nora’s problem is the opposite. If you want the sweep and the devil, this is a good book. If you want the question, it was answered before page one.

    How it ends

    It ends with a sacrifice and a long game against the devil, generously and at length.

    Contains

    A coercive relationship with the entity, over centuries; Suicidal ideation in Henry’s backstory

    Skip if

    Skip it if what you loved in Haig was the doubt; Addie has none.

    Checked against: Wikipedia: plot, sales, reception, Kirkus review

Where this page’s facts come from

• Leslie Lindsay: interview with Matt Haig on The Midnight Library (Oct 2020) — Haig in his own words on the library idea, the piano, and depression as “the desire to inhabit parallel lives”.
• NPR: It’s Not Quite Dark Enough in The Midnight Library (Oct 2020) — The honest review; the “comforting but overly simplified” verdict.
• LitCharts: The Midnight Library quotes, with chapter and page — Both Mrs Elm lines on this page are verified against it.
• Wikipedia: The Midnight Library — Publication, page count, awards, UK sales, the critics’ lines from Kirkus, PW and the Guardian.
• Variety: Florence Pugh to star, Garth Davis to direct (May 2026) — The film announcement: writers, timeline, distribution.
• The Credits (MPA): Paramount lands The Midnight Library (May 2026) — The North American deal.
• NPR: Matt Haig on The Life Impossible (Aug 2024) — For the FAQ on his follow-up.
• Reactor: Jo Walton on Replay (2012) — The best short account of the novel the whole sub-genre comes from.
• The Bibliofile, Book Girls’ Guide, She Reads: the ranking lists — What the SERP currently recommends, and the buckets it uses; the warning section answers them.